Introduction

Abstract

“Hardly a new feature of human history” (Appadurai 2005 [1996]: 4), migration (from Latin migrare, the process or act of migrating) entails “population movements either within nation states or across borders” (Berghahn and Sternberg 2010a: 12). According to Anthony Marsella and Erin Ring, “The impulse to migrate is inherent in human nature—an instinctual and inborn disposition and inclination to wonder and wander in search of new opportunities and new horizons” (2003: 3). But if “[m]igration movements were long confined to relatively straightforward and linear relations between closely linked poles” (World Migration: 4), new migration patterns, as Giorgio Bertellini maintains, “have followed ever more complicate geographical routes” over the past half century. “As such,” he argues, “they have more broadly and radically affected contemporary media geography and film poetics even though migrations per se have not had a comparably transformative impact on all national film cultures” (2013: 1).